I think it’s probably a bit of both, skill being lost to parents having less time to cook and everything being more expensive.

The cheapest way I know of one can survive a very long time is rice and beans with any source of fat. I personally like peanut butter, but understand that’s very much a US thing. But prepping beans over night requires having the time and know-how to do it.

It’s largely based on this video: https://youtu.be/QNPwKMOQIKM

Which has a quite complete list of sources.

While my comment is about c++, not c, I did learn about one use case where rust is strictly worse than c++. Unbelievably low latency applications. Such as software that trades stocks. The way it’s implemented, is by sharing memory addresses across code intentionally having the same address written to and read from across threads. Something rust is sort of designed to not support.

It’s the only use case I know of where that’s true.